Gay Women Face Taboo In Mexico, Keep Low Profile

An Activist Estimates That Fewer Than 1 Percent Of The Country's Lesbians Are ''out Of The Closet.''

March 13, 1994|By Cox News Service

MEXICO CITY — The small wood frame house on a quiet side street hardly looks like the heart of social and sexual rebellion. But on Saturday nights, the people inside drinking and dancing are not women and men but only women. In Mexico, that is nearly revolutionary.

Every weekend, Mexico City's only openly lesbian social club fills. Many of the more than 100 young and middle-aged women keep their sexual orientation a secret at home and at work but ''come out'' once a week at the ''Closet of Sor Juana.''

The club is named for the 17th century nun and poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, considered Mexico's first feminist.

''The Closet is a place where women can be gay without having to announce it to the world,'' said Patria Jimenez, a founder. ''When they come here, they're not marching at the front of a gay parade. They don't have to confront society with their sexuality. ''

While it may be more acceptable to be an openly gay woman in the United States, in Mexico, lesbianism is taboo. Fewer than 1 percent of Mexico's lesbians are ''out of the closet,'' estimates Gloria Carreaga, a gay activist and a founder of the Closet, which also serves as a meeting place for heterosexual feminists.

The largely underground movement of lesbians is working to gain basic rights, such as sexual liberty and freedom from discrimination. Gay activists struggle against machismo that rewards female passivity - not activism - and against the sexual teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

''We never had a sexual revolution in Mexico,'' said Marta Lamas, a heterosexual feminist and editor of Feminist Debate, a magazine.

She said many Mexican women accept traditional roles that keep them at home in the kitchen and at the reception desk in the workplace.

''There are two faces of machismo,'' she said. ''The first face is terrible, and the second face is the one that protects women, pampers them, pays for them. A lot of women, especially in the middle class, are comfortable with the role.''

Lamas said the fight for women's rights in other countries has typically started at home when working mothers, fed up with shouldering housework and outside jobs, confront their husbands. In Mexico, that particular domestic squabble doesn't occur because most middle-class families have servants, she said.

At parties, young Mexican women, most of whom marry before 30, vie for male attention. They adhere to a traditional high-heeled, short-skirted femininity. Most do not question the social custom that allows married men to have girlfriends while wives must be monogamous.

Carreaga, who works in the gender studies department of Mexico City's National University, said the school is the only place where she can be openly gay without suffering professionally. Elsewhere, homosexuality would carry a stigma and block her advancement, she said.

She said that once Mexican men realize she is gay, they view her as a man. ''At family functions, it's the women in one room, and me and the men in another. Men have two reactions to me. They either compete with me for other women or they try to seduce me, thinking that they can cure me.''

Mexico's lesbian and feminist movements started in the 1970s, when the United States was in the midst of social upheaval that permanently altered the role of women there. Mexican lesbian and heterosexual feminists joined numerous small women's organizations, many tied to the political left or to community organizations.

Fractured from the start, the feminist movement never gained a powerful voice capable of swaying national politics, as the National Organization for Women has done in the United States.

Now some 2,000 Mexican feminists - about half of them are lesbians - are members of a variety of organizations, including civil liberties unions and peasants' organizations.

But activism in the interest of purely feminist causes is limited mainly to taking part in feminist or gay parades and protests, writing for publication and backing legislators and legislation that further women's rights.

''We are not powerful like NOW is powerful,'' Lamas said. ''We have a lot of influence but it is more diffuse,'' she added.

''We have never gotten anywhere by being militantly lesbian,'' Jimenez added.

That attitude is reflected in the club.

There is no sign on the house, and women hear of it by word of mouth. Jimenez tells neighbors that the Saturday night dances and weekday meetings are part of a women's political group.

''Sometimes the neighbors send over a patrol on Saturday nights, and the people peer in the door and say, 'What's going on here? There are only women.''' She grinned. ''We say, 'Yeah, so what.' ''